Bird-watching and walking through the Forest of Bowland, 19/05/2018

MY VISIT TO THE FOREST OF BOWLAND:

On the 19th of May, a warm, balmy Saturday, I went with 5 other men to this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), the Forest of Bowland. Wikipedia refers to this as the Bowland Fells. It is not a forest in the traditional sense. It is an area marked by gritstone fells and peat moorland. These areas include the geographical centre of the United Kingdom. They also encompass the Trough of Bowland, a large valley within it.

I went with Graham, Michael, Steve, Ken and Steven - this was a meeting organised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (the RSPB), Lancaster Group. Our walk leader would be Graham Thomas, a veteran RSPB volunteer for decades. Michael was the man who picked me up from the Lancaster railway station and brought me to the starting point of our walk, the main Parking Lot of the forest. In reality, this was just an area to the side of the road. On getting out of the car, I realised, immediately, that this was a lovely outdoors event. I had with me just me new Canon 7D Mark II with the various EF lenses. Our aim was to circumnavigate a section of the park, trying to spot and listen to the avifauna of the area.

The walk lasted over 5 hours and we did nearly 10.5 km, all cross-country and up and down. On approaching a clearing near Littledale Hall (an old house which now has a drugs rehab centre), we had our packed lunch, before setting off once again. By the time we completed our walk, we had seen only 6-7 bird species but identified over 20 through their calls. We had also burnt a lot of calories and got good exercise. Here are some memories of this unique excursion.

In the evening, Graham gave me a lift right into Preston, from where I caught a bus to return to Blackpool In the latter part of the evening, I would join the members of the Fylde Coast Hindu Society for some good food and song-singing, but that is another story.

Links:

https://www.forestofbowland.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Bowland

Redoux: Visit to RSPB Leighton Moss Bird Reserve

I made a repeat trip to this excellent bird reserve located in Silverdale in the district of Cumbria. The reason: haven't gone for birding in a long, long time and wanted to do it as I was missing it sorely.

The repeat visit came on a weekend that the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) had announced as the Annual Garden Bird Counting weekend. The aim of this was to watch birds that visited one's garden for an hour and to record all the birds that visited the garden during that hour. I realised early on that this would not work for me as I live in hospital quarters, and there isn't much of a garden there. 

Hence, I decided to go back to his lovely reserve at Silverdale. Silverdale is located north of Lancaster. It is a small town, and is advertised as the best location for a quiet holiday by the authortities themselves. Just five minutes walk from the station is the Leighton Moss Nature Reserve. It is owned and maintained by the RSPB. There is no entrance fee. As you enter, you are into their visitor centre which also has a display of the best ornithological books on sale, a mix of other kinds of merchandise including tee-shirts, cups, etc. and a row of sales counters. Just behind is a staircase that takes one up to their cafe. To the right of the sales counters, one goes past the sales items to a door that opens out on the back of the building and directly on the reserve area. 

Here, one can stroll to their main show area with a canopy from under which you can see and photograph garden birds that stroll the grounds (such as pheasants and dunnocks) or that alight on the feeders to eat the delicious bird food left there by the reserve volunteers (such as tits, robins, chaffinces, redpolls, finches, blackbirds, and even doves and the wood pigeon). Once you are done taking these photos, you have the option to walk to any one of the five different bird hides spread out over the grounds. 

In the event, I visited all five. While the first one is located a very short distance away, there are hides that are upto 2 km away. I had great fun observing birds that wade or swim in the various water-bodies, as well as those that fly here and there. I saw various kinds of these water-birds today. But, most of all, I saw my first bittern today from the Lower Hide (the one that is farthest from the visitor centre).

Not surprisingly, there were a fair number of casual and more dedicated visitors. Many, like me, were birder-photographers, and some had cameras far more advanced than mine and lenses that looked oh-so-mighty. Some even had telescopic viewers. I did chat a bit with some of them, and learned that they were into serious birding only since the last several years (like me, too).

After my birding, I visited the cafe for lunch. They routinely give a 10% discount to guests who visit the centre by public transport or on bikes. I used that to get a dicount. I had a vegetarian quiche, (as the  kitchen had run out of chicken-based items) that tasted quite delicious. 

Here are some pictures that I took:

Male pheasant

Male Chaffinch

Male Mallard duck

Female pheasant

Nuthatch

Female Blackbird

Great Tit

Brown squirrel eating up the bird grain

Egret with fish in its bill

Teals

Teals again

Marsh harrier, record shot

Blue Tit

Robin

Female Blackbird

Grazing cow on the reserve

Cormorants

Pintail (centre)

The entrance to the lower hide

Cormorant drying its wings

My attire on this day 

Watch tower built from Heritage Lottery Fund

The Quiche I had for lunch

I returned home again via train. The journey was as unexciting as the journey I had undertaken TO the reserve in the morning. The only note of interest might be the fact that since the past two weekends, and for the next 6-8 weekends, train services from Blackpool North to Preston do not run and are replaced by BUS services. This is because the railways are carrying out repairs and renovation work between these two stations. While the buses are luxury buses, it does take nearly an hour to travel by a bus as conpared to a train journey which takes only 28-30 minutes. 

A week gone by, I: A visit to Blackpool zoo

Eventually, blogs have a way of going slow once a routine sets in. Even so, there are highlights in anyone's life that can brighten up not just the blogger themselves, but also the reader, who is their well-wisher and a "participant" in their life by virtue of being an avid follower. Hence, dear reader, fret not. I haven't found the time to write, but there have been events in my life that I wish to report here ... and so, here we go. 

On the last Saturday (the 19th), I went out in the morning to visit the local zoo. I took with me my old faithful - my Canon DSLR camera. The morning was chilly, but not overly so. There was a mild drizzle. I reached the zoo at about half-past nine, and had to wait for about 30 minutes before the zoo opened. I used the time to go through their leaflets, and to get myself a penny memento (for which you need to put a pound coin in a machine and press a particular handle to get an imprint of a zoo animal on to a penny coin template). 

The zoo is a good one, but it was almost empty as this is an off-season period for Blackpool. There is a big section where they have made plaster statues of dinosaurs. Their dinosaur walk is quite interesting. Statues are distributed on land masses as well as on to water bodies to depict the dinosaurs in their natural milieu. An audio recording of grunts and growls continues to charm the visitor from background speakers. A few non-dino animals such as a huge crocodile replica also hold the centre-stage, while the trip ends with a few large mammals such as the mammoth.

The big zoo begins a little ahead. Along the way, you encounter free-roaming peacocks and peahens. Then you are past the walking corridor and upon the various zoo sections. As there were no crowds of visitors, I was able to walk in peace, watch the animals in relative quiet, and meet with the zoo workers without any pressure. The zoo has a fair number of mammals, but I can't say the same for birds, of which there are not more than 30 species. Tropical birds are, of course, not there in the zoo at all, but even sea-birds (pelagic birds) are few and far between. I did see a lot of waders, especially the red ibis, the duck species, the greater flamingos and some others. However, there were few birds from among other water birds, and very less of the raptors. 

The best enclosures were those of the gorilla, the orang-utan, the giraffe, the Magellanic penguins, the sea-lions, the Bactrian camel, the reindeer, the reptile den, the Amazonia display and the small monkeys and related animal cages. In particular, I was enchanted by the common squirrel monkeys, which were a bit too friendly, the lemurs, the capybara rats, the wallabys, the mamosets and a few others that I cannot recall.

I had my lunch of rice and kheema in the cafe. It was pretty tasty. 

About photography: my camera screen misted over with fog after about an hour of taking good snaps. I continued to click photos in the "Auto" mode, and the result was all right, I guess, but, because the screen was not displaying anything, I was unable to see what I was clicking except through the viewer window. I decided to take photos with my phone camera as well, and the overall result was a collection of about a hundred odd photos, some of which look good, some, average, and some, spoiled, because I could not control their quality or adjust the various settings.

The sea-lion show: There was a twenty-minute show with three sea-lions. The trainers obviously spend thousands of man-hours training the sea-lions in various ways, and this is something one can tell just be watching the show. These cute animals needed little prompting other than a kind word and a promise of dried fish goodies thrown at their mouths to perform an amazing repertoire of activities that would put our parenting skills to shame! I shot a long video of the show, but I think it got erased before it could be saved. 

And now, the photos. I have chosen just a dozen here. However, I have posted some on my social media, and you might want to see them there by visiting me on FB.

Apatosaurus

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Tanystropheus

The penny memento I made from their memento machine

The red titi monkeys

The gorilla family

One of the female orang utans

The Magellanic penguins

Emperor tamarins

Common squirrel monkey

\Giraffe

Red Ibis

That's all for now ... Thanks for reading.  More on the past week in my next post. 

P.S. All the photos are untouched, except for cropping.